


In Symbols

by karanguni



Category: Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Genre: Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:zhiverny6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-04
Updated: 2010-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the storm, there was a beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Symbols

It was the time spent waiting between the scraeling and the second landing that drove him mad. Worse than nine days spent hanging was that hundred year void where a god was not a god, not a thing; not dead, yet not alive. All there was was the pounding of relentless waves and the bitter cold.

He remembers the first dedication. When they cut the scraeling's entrails out with the spear, its blood dripped onto the ground and up through the roots of the tree.

The symbol is the thing.

The world tree accepted and drank deep. Blood lasts like nothing else, reverberates a second for every second that the thing sacrificed lived. As the All Father hung from its boughs, life flowed back into him; and as ravens plucked his eyes out left and right they whispered their secrets into his ears. Thought and memory came back to him, and in the silence of the shipless seaside Odin waited.

He did not wait alone. Somehow they forgot about the other god who was responsible for this most clever and damning of tricks. They forgot Loki, who had ridden on their sails and on their arrogance and their bloodlust. Best of all for him was the chaos, and when the scraeling war party descended on the men from the North the Trickster fed on the screams and the panic and his revenge over the One Eyed God.

When the Northmen all lay dead, their boats burnt so that none may come after them, Loki - Trickster for good or Trickster for Evil - sat beneath the boughs of the tree, and waited himself into equal madness with Odin by that same sea.

There is companionship, in the suffering.

\---

_1923_

If nothing else, Baldur was a quiet boy. He never made any trouble, never was anything but polite. The sort who, had there been a cat that needed saving, would've been the one comforting the distraught owner, and succeeding at that. Nothing could ever quite faze him, except for vulgar language and the idea that the world wasn't _really_ storybook perfect.

The house that he'd made for himself was small, but impeccably neat. Well-furnished and made for a quiet winter's night - like this one - spent reading in front of the fireplace. Outside, snow covered the streets in white, opaque drifts as the wind beat insistently against the frozen glass windows for the third night running; inside, there was nothing but stillness and the crackle of a log fire. The flames cast deep gold light onto dark, worn mahogany furniture. Baldur seemed content, even after days of forced curfew, to sit and watch vigilantly for when the embers needed more fuel.

Baldur was that kind of a man. That kind of a _gentleman_. Every mother up and down four streets had, at one point or another, tried to interest him in their daughters. He'd always given them a chivalrous, regretful and inevitable _no_ in response. The girls themselves, they were simply waiting for summer and an excuse to swear short sundresses to come around - maybe he wouldn't be such a stick in the mud then. Such a handsome stick in the mud.

Laufeson, his housemate, had given up sometime during the grey morning. After watching his blond counterpart sit unmoving and unresponsive save for the polite "yes"es in response to bored questions, he'd opened the door by the cold-as-hell knob and walked out into the suicide of the falling snow.

But Laufeson counted himself a real northerner, and a real northerner never feared simple winter. It was an expected change, and here the days even during the height of the cold were longer than the ones at home. Laufeson walked into the face of the blizzard and grinned against its cruel, biting edge; he enjoyed it, felt alive in it. Last spring had been harsh; if the Americans had bothered to realise their seasons and the limitations of their land, then perhaps they wouldn't have pushed the frontiers the way that they did, perhaps this winter wouldn't have come chasing down the tails of dusts storms that left several states fleeing farms and family alike. It was mayhem out in the frontier states.

It was getting dark, so Laufeson started to turn back. The idea of spending another night with his statuesque friend had him spitefully kicking piled up snowdrifts everywhere until the stuff covered the door of the neighbour's. Then he broke a few windows for good measure, ran down the empty street yelling in his foreign and forgotten language, hollering to the sky until he realised that it was pointless, goddamned and goddamning pointless, to sit this still doing nothing. Winter madness, they call it.

Something needed to change. Laufeson decided it there on the empty street: something was going to change. He felt his blood burn with the need for it, even in the chill of the wind. He made his way back.

Laufeson opened the door to find Baldur adding yet another few pieces of fuel to the fire. The younger man seemed completely unperturbed, and only requested that Laufeson close the door behind him, which he did. 'How was your walk?' Baldur asked after the cold was shut out, smiling beatifically, so serene he seemed drugged.

Laufeson grinned back. 'Good,' he said, rubbing warm hands together. 'Almost perfect.'

\---

It was Jesus' pagan-adopted birthday a week later. The inhabitants of the backwater county looked upon the date more as an excuse to celebrate with food and a lot of drink than as anything holy, but that suited Laufeson fine. The storm had subsided into gentle snowfall, and before anyone could stop it there were stores selling garish tinsel as a bad rendition of _Jingle Bells_ was broadcast for the 14th time that day on local radio.

Laufeson stomped his boots on the face of Saint Nick on the welcome mat, shaking off the ice before he entered the toasty warmth of the local general store. There were a good number of other shoppers there, their baskets piled up high with everything from tinkling bells and crackers to cheap party favours.

Laufeson's only purchase was some mistletoe. ("Planning a party, Mr Laufeson?" "Something like that, Mrs Gibbons." "That'll be four dollars and a quarter." "And a very merry Christmas to you.")

'What's this?' Baldur asked when he stepped in through the door later that day, juggling two large brown paper bags - evidence of his almost housewife-ish errand of stocking up on food and hard liquor. With simple clarity, Laufeson reflected on how much he actually hated the womanly perfection of his roommate. Baldur looked up at the new decorations in the doorway.

Laufeson, sprawled on the duvet where he had been waiting, looked up. 'An old thing that the ones around here forgot and then made new,' he said, slinking up like a smug, satisfied old cat. 'They kiss under it for good luck. They think it's quaint, this bloody little symbol of ours.' Laufeson's smile was at once dark and brilliant. Baldur felt strangely suffocated.

'Do you remember the circles?' Laufeson asked. 'The last, gurgling breaths of the ones who had been chosen and taken? How they smelt? How the snow looked like back then, bright with red?'

Baldur's lips drew back, just slightly. He flinched. Laufeson laughed, softly, and touched him on the shoulder. 'Do you believe in it?' he asked, flicking his eyes up at the mistletoe.

Baldur swallowed, the sound audible in the silence that always followed him. It made Laufeson itch and crave and burn.

'I remember,' the younger man said, words stuttering slightly. 'Darkness everywhere, then bright hot fire blazing like the wolf-chased sun, and blood spilling hotter than that, human cries drowned out by the beat of druidic feet on the ground louder than their last heartbeats --' Baldur shuddered as Laufeson's fingers wrapped around the back of his neck, caressing. 'I remember,' he said, 'I remember them believing.'

'Good,' Laufeson murmured, his breath against Baldur's ear, and it seemed to Baldur that he flickered, once a man dressed shabbily with a harmless, wicked smile, then a monster of a hundred forms, shifting and horrendous. Laufeson's mouth was burning against his, a wet tongue between his lips, and the memory of blood made his bones shiver with want. The paper bags tumbled to the floor, a bottle of alcohol shattering and sending up fumes. Baldur pushed back, suddenly alive, digging his fingers into the unkempt mop of Laufeson's hair, pulling urgently. He did not notice Laufeson's other hand reaching above him to pull down the serrated leaves. He only felt Laufeson's cool fingers, going underneath cloth and up against the skin of his naked breast. Baldur stood, paralysed by the hazardous tumble of his thoughts and the worship of his body that he could practically taste.

'Say my name,' Laufeson panted, 'my true name.'

The leaf pierced through Baldur's heart just as he buckled upward with a cry that was both the sound of release and a name. The mistletoe was a blade in Laufeson's hand; it sliced first through flesh, then cut bone, gashing vessel and severing vein.

Laufeson bent his head and licked the blood that flowed from the wound, and when he had his fill he let the rest gather as viscous drops on the dark green of the mistletoe. He left Baldur's body there, soulless, and put a laurel of thorny leaves around his forehead like an ironic little salute to the day.

Christmas fell on a Wednesday, that year. Laufeson stopped by the calendar on his way out of the house, and tapped the day chidingly. 'You should've remembered that I'm an impatient son of a bitch.'

Then Loki, Laufey's son and Lie-Smith, Sky Walker and Trickster, left, letting the wind blow him wherever, his bones kept warm with fresh power flowing like hot mead through him. The patterns began to break out of their set tessellations. The wheels started to turn.

When Odin returned from his wanderings, he found his son a shadow rotting on a dusty floor, and his son's keeper gone from that place.


End file.
